Visual Impact Assessment capability development - phase 2

Warning

The viewshed maps on this page are very detailed and may take quite a while to display in many web browsers, and may not render at all on small devices such as smartphones or tablets. They are provided purely for development purposes, and final versions will be optimised for faster display.

Calculating compound viewsheds

The map below shows the viewsheds (with Earth curvature and atmospheric refraction corrections) for three hypothetical towers each 200 metres tall at the indicated positions around the town of Cobar in western NSW, where the terrain is quite flat.

This is the second step in developing documented, reproducible, open-source capabilities for visual impact assessment of large structures such as wind turbines. The intention is to implement many of the metrics and enhancements to simple viewsheds described in this paper.

Displaying number of towers visible

Here the map is shaded according to how many towers are visible from each point on the map, from zero (transparent shading) to three (since there are only three hypothetical towers).